My new guilty writing pleasure

Thealove recently gifted me (in advance for our 4th anniversary, we were so excited) with a specimen of the Ferrari of notebooks, the Moleskine notebook.

It’s the popular ruled pocketsize version, which looks like a tiny bible or a black book of secrets. The notebook also has a cardboard and cloth pocket inside to store photos, receipts, and other items.

We’ve been looking at these notebooks at Fully Booked Serendra for some time now, but until recently we’ve been looking at them as insanely-priced notebooks and thought money was best spent elsewhere. However, a few weeks can change one’s opinion, and after seeing some old and loved specimens filled with writings and drawings (mainly from Butch Dalisay’s blog) we planned get Moleskines.

And so here they are! Twin Moleskines, one for me and one for her. We wrote dedications to each other on the first page, and it initially felt weird writing on the very expensive paper. I thought to myself that if there were no laptops in this world, this was the equivalent of writing with a top of the line Mac. It’s a bit of a paradox, because if I think about how expensive it is, I find it hard to write on, as if I have to save the paper by writing only the most important things and even then only microscopically! But the beauty of these notebooks only reveal themselves when they are filled, so, as with most quality items really, you get your money’s worth the more you use it. So I have to minutely temper my skinflint nature and embrace writing on the acid free paper bound in leather.

 It’s the old-world charm that makes me love this notebook. It reminds me of the Sandwhich song “Betamax.” (Wala pa noong ipod, internet, cd, mp3…) Too many people write on computers nowadays, and they spend so much upgrading their hardware, which is not really bad, but sometimes stepping back to something old and classic is worth trying. I wanted to rekindle the classic feeling of writing on a fine notebook, and I am inspired by the quirky idea of using a pocketbook to store important information instead of in a smartphone, pda, or ultramobile laptop.

Now what am I going to write in it?

Or, what pen am I going to use with it? Dapat ba fountain pen para bagay? These are the sort of nutty inquiries this little pocketbook has illicited. Or maybe I should slap myself and say wake up you’ve got something impractical. Sometimes I enjoy plainly looking at it, and I don’t find that strange. The finer things in life are never impractical, if you use them well and often.

“I’ve got to write this down” has suddenly achieved an interesting personal twist. = )

P.S.

Check out what Thealove has to say about her notebook here: http://theaalberto.wordpress.com/2008/06/28/my-legendary-notebook/#comments

JEEZ!

These are the pix of our band rehearsal. We were formerly known as “The Faculty of JLDDG.” Now that we’re into serious-mode, we had to pick a new name, hehe. I’ll write more about this soon.

Giselle “Brando” Hernandez-vocals

Reagan “Punk Poetry” Maiquez-guitar and vocals

Nicolo Masakayan-guitar

Paul Fonte-bass

Kit Manlangit-drums and violin(!)

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYkymI_dWYE

Sometimes World, Art Imitates Life Imitates Art

i first heard about the new Filipino Journey vocalist in the news early this year. I thought it was just some tryout rockstar contest that landed our Pinoy brother the dream job, and I just shrugged it off as something cool but not spectacular. That was before I got the details.

Arnel Pineda, Journey’s new vocalist, was discovered thru Youtube. A lot of us would probably say “now what are the chances of that?” You think about the foreign bands you idolize, they seem so far away, almost as if existing in a different dimension, and then one day you receive an email from one of your gods asking if you’re for real and would you like to be their new vocalist. Insane!

Then I realized how big Journey was, that Steve Perry was the original vocalist, that they’re toe-to-toe with those other 80’s one-name bands like Chicago and Toto and so on. But the most amazing thing with the story is always Arnel Pineda. I watched selections from Journey’s Chile concert from Youtube, and Pineda is for real. Close your eyes and you can imagine it is Steve Perry singing “Faithfully” (the song that landed Pineda the job) but not quite. The range is a bit farther, a bit less restrained compared to the original, the way Filipinos sing and win all these singing contests all over the world. The performance can pass for “plakado,” but listen carefully and you’ll figure out how Pineda is adding his own vocal signature to the songs. Incredible. Journey has been Filipinized, haha.

I’m writing like a fan now. Fantastic. Imagine your favorite band, then imagine fronting that band. Brilliant.

Arnel Pineda sings “Don’t Stop Believing,” and somewhere Mark Wahlberg is smiling.

 

Fingers Crossed for the Promotion

Not just mine, mind you, but everybody else’s. The reason for this empathy, however, may sound a bit self-interested as well.

Last April, we received the Calls for Promotion from the UP Administration. I was a member of my department’s Academic Personnel Committee (APC), and was tasked to assist the Chairman in all the promotion matters. Suddenly, my humdrum life as an APC member, which hitherto consisted mainly of watching fidgety and nervous teaching demonstrations from applicants, became a high-octane existence.

We, the members of the APC, worked at refining the guidelines for promotion, making sure that the “scholarly/creative work distinct to the unit” was added, so that our poets, playwrights, actors, and directors could have some share of the promotion pie. This task, because of some silly miscommunications and misunderstandings, probably took us nearly 100 man-hours to finish.

Then there was the task of collecting the portfolios of every interested faculty. The thing that bothered me with this part of the promotion was this: How could we be so strict with the submissions of our students (showing the height of anal-retentiveness by specifiying the font size and margins and folder color and paper type and format and all and refusing to check-or even accept-anything that strays from this format) and be so lax about rules and guidelines ourselves? I could only think of a handful of faculty members who followed the format of the portfolio. It was absurd. It got even more absurd when some faculty members actually argued that their format was “almost exactly like” the prescribed format, so can’t we just accept them to spare the teachers the work of having to reformat? It was crazy. Rules and formats and guidelines are exactly what they are–being a teacher doesn’t excuse you from them, in fact it’s your supreme responsibility to follow them, so that you could lead by example. Anyway, we chucked our anal-retention aside and took in the portfolios, but somehow that simple exercise of collecting them left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, there was the job of assigning points to the portfolios, looking for missing proofs and documentation, quadruple-checking the computations, and placing everything in the all-important matrix form. This was hands-down the most mind-numbing experience I’ve had in my career as APC member, for the simple fact that the promotion guidelines seemed written in water and open to misinterpretation. So we had to compute and recompute, and argue endlessly who got the correct interpretation of this or that guideline. Then almost daily we received emails from the Dean regarding “corrected” guidelines, so we had to go back to square one, and sometimes the work we had achieved in some of our marathon meetings (from lunch up to 9PM at one time, up to dinnertime in so many others) were scrapped.

All this work inevitably frayed our nerves. At times I seriously contemplated some form of recreation to alleviate our stress (boxing each other glove-less perhaps?). We lived, breathed, and exhaled the promotions. We were neglecting loved ones (Thealove was becoming increasingly suspicious of my “overtime”) and even ourselves. Here one piece of advice I got somewhere became very useful: never take your work home. After every marathon meeting I’d take a cold shower to wash the sweat and revitalize myself, then I would read Stephen King or The Motorcycle Diaries by Guevara to, as Wittgenstein once said, “wash the mind.”

The promotions are now out of the APC’s hands (I pray). We submitted the final matrix to the dean, including all the summaries with all the computations, remarks, and Coke Zero stains intact. 

So you see how I meant that wishing for everyone’s promotion can be self-interested. I’m not really a fan of everyone in the Department, sorry. But if somebody doesn’t get promoted, after all that brain-bleeding APC work, I’m going to be really pissed.  

Dedicated to the APC of the Department of Humanities 2007-2008